‘No one is innocent,’ he’d said. She wondered again why he’d been expelled from school. She took a deep breath as the familiar panic started to prickle her skin, make her breath short. She shouldn’t have been so scared by Chorleigh the previous night. He hadn’t hurt her, he’d just startled her, even though the memory made her shiver. Nick was driving back today, that was the most important thing.
Jazz had told her they had charged River’s stepfather with concealing the body and were working towards a confession. She remembered his face at the mortuary, his grief, what looked like agony. Maybe he regretted causing River so much pain, maybe he wished he hadn’t done it.
She pulled around the half-open gate and onto the scrubby gravel to park her car next to Alistair’s. There were no other cars, no police presence. She opened the original water report on her phone.
‘We’ve tested every water course within a mile, none of them produced spores (labelled a–f in micrographs),’ the scientist had written. ‘Our ecologist suggests mosses or liverworts, possibly, exact species unknown. The investigation doesn’t have a warrant to search for water on the suspect’s land.’ The enlarged picture of one of the green spores made it look like a Fabergé rugby ball, less than a tenth of a millimetre long.
She had packed her field microscope, and thought she could at least test the water in the wells for similar green blobs, although she would need a much more powerful microscope to get a precise match. She also had a few bits of surveying equipment, although she knew from previous experience how unstable wells could be and wasn’t going to get too close. She took a few slow, deep breaths at the thought of an old well, somewhere, maybe with Lara’s remains in it. She waited until the flashbacks of seeing the dead face of her student in the well had faded. Time was ticking by. She wanted to have something to take to the briefing in – she checked her watch – less than two hours. Maybe it would help keep Lara’s investigation alive if she could find something.
The place seemed quiet. Alistair’s car was parked at an angle and an attempt had been made to drag the gate a few feet before it dug into the gravel. Perhaps he was trying to keep everyone out now the police were finally gone.
She still hesitated before she rapped the knocker against the door; it seemed so quiet. The day was overcast. Rain was expected later but so far it was dry and mild. The dog erupted inside the house, barking and getting louder. She could hear Chorleigh shouting at him. When he got close to the door, he shouted through it.
‘I don’t want to talk to anyone!’
‘I’m sorry, Mr Chorleigh. It’s Sage Westfield. I just need to test some water. I don’t need to come into the house.’
There was a wait before he opened the door and she bent to stroke the ecstatic dog. ‘Oh. It’s you.’ He looked awful; his eyes were red and she could smell the alcohol coming off him.
‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ she said. ‘I just wanted to have a look at two water sources marked on old plans from when your house was built.’
‘I’m tired of your people traipsing in without even asking.’
‘They aren’t my people, Mr Chorleigh, and I am asking. If we can rule out the water sample we have matching any source on your land that helps you.’
He pushed the door open a little wider. ‘I don’t mean you,’ he grumbled. ‘I’m tired of it all, the police, the press. I wish they’d leave me alone.’
‘They have a suspect in custody,’ Sage said.
‘Good. Maybe they’ll leave me alone.’
Sage pointed down the side of the house. ‘Do you mind if I look at the old well marked on the plans?’
‘I keep the cover on. I was worried about the dog falling down it.’
‘Could you show me?’
The well was in the grounds beyond the house and behind the tennis court. Sage avoided looking at the grave site, now covered with a white tarp. The well had a circular wooden lid, old and covered with mosses and lichens which looked a hundred years old. It might have kept the dog safe but it would never have taken the weight of an adult human.
She gingerly walked closer, worried in case it wasn’t stable, but it looked robust enough with four courses of bricks under the lid. Sage managed to get close enough to feed a glass sample bottle through a hole on one edge and lower it on a piece of fishing line. Chorleigh had pulled filthy wellies on and was wearing a dressing gown over his clothes. He still made her nervous.
She pulled up the sample bottle full of brownish water. The water table was high here too; the bottle filled up at six feet or so down the well. ‘Thank you,’ she said, scribbling a label in waterproof pen. ‘Can I see the borehole next?’ She was glad to leave the well behind.
‘It’s in the old boiler room.’ He waved at the side of the house. The outhouse was further back than she had thought from the photos, and covered in ivy. No wonder she hadn’t noticed it, it blended in with the side of the house, also covered with creepers. She tried the door: it was unlocked and opened a few inches but the roof seemed to have fallen in, dropping debris behind the opening. In the end, Chorleigh put his shoulder to the door, and with a crack it gave way. He was able to open it enough for Sage to lean in.
The borehole was narrow, and had a metal grill over the top that was bolted in place. It was easy to get a sample. There was no chance anyone had fallen down there. ‘Four and a half metres down,’ she said, filling in the label. She struggled past the remains of an old, rusted machine she guessed was a boiler and out into the garden. She held up the sample: it was clear. ‘Is this the water you still use?’
‘There’s an electric pump in the house. It pulls the water up through a pipe running inside.’
‘I saw. What happens if your power gets cut off?’
‘We have a header tank in the house. It keeps us going until the electric goes back on.’
‘Oh. Good. Thank you for your help.’
He rubbed his hair, making it stick up even more. ‘So, what are you going to do now?’
‘I’ll look at them under the microscope, so I can compare them with water found in Lara’s film case in 1992.’ She held up the sample. ‘I just wanted to rule out the possibility that Lara wandered into either of them.’
‘She couldn’t get down the borehole.’ Chorleigh snorted. ‘The police did look down the old well when she first went missing, but they didn’t find anything.’
‘But it was always covered?’
He shook his head. ‘Not always. The stable hands and gardeners used to take water for the garden and for mucking out the stable from there.’ He waved a hand at the samples. ‘What are you looking for?’
‘They found a film case full of water in Lara’s camera case. There were unusual spores from a few types of plant in there but the water was surprisingly clean, no chlorine, very low levels of contaminants.’
‘Like our bore water? I know that’s very clean, we get it checked every now and then.’
‘Perhaps.’ She lifted her bag onto her shoulder.
He seemed to wrestle with himself. ‘You can come indoors, if you like. I’ll get cleaned up, make some tea.’
She hesitated as he stomped towards the house, his boots shedding mud from the recent storms. Hamish barked around him, loving the game. Chorleigh might have frightened her last night, but he hadn’t meant to. She followed him. The idea of using the scope in a well-lit room was appealing and she didn’t have time to go back to the lab before the meeting. He’d never threatened her and it would only take a few minutes.
While Chorleigh went upstairs with a handful of clothes plucked from the airer in the kitchen, she sat at the table and got the microscope out. Dropping a sample onto a clean slide, she looked through the lens.
The specimen from the outside well was teeming with organisms; the rotting cover itself must have fed the well with nutrients as well as insects that had fallen in. It had a slight cloudiness, a hint of brown colouration. There were a few ovals, like green rugby balls that were large enough to b
e algae but too big to be moss spores. In the sample from Lara’s camera, there were just two species. This water definitely wasn’t a match.
The other sample was clear and, when she examined it under different magnifications from ten to forty she couldn’t find much of anything in it. Higher magnification suggested a few bacteria, but they were too small to identify, nothing like the spores that Trent had picked up.
‘Well?’ Chorleigh had showered and dressed, and was towelling his hair dry when he walked back into the kitchen. ‘Is it the well or the borehole?’
‘Neither. I think you should cover the well with something better, though, for Hamish’s safety. Wells can be dangerous.’ She shivered down the memory of the well collapsing the year before.
‘I will.’ He hesitated, staring at the microscope.
‘Would you like to have a look?’ He didn’t say anything, but moved a step closer. She pushed the scope over. ‘This is your borehole water. It’s clean. Better than tap water, really.’
He angled his head to look through the lens. ‘I can’t see anything.’
‘That’s good.’ She swapped slides. ‘Now try this, the water from the old well.’
A smile creased his face and he looked back at Sage. ‘Good God.’
‘I know. It’s organic soup. The water saturates the soil and collects bacteria and bugs from the ground, from the farmed land, animal dung, decaying plants, anything in the soil.’
‘No wonder they dug the borehole. They bought the land when the family who owned the farm here died out. No sons to carry on the family business, they broke the farm up into several parcels and sold it. My great-grandfather bought this plot and built the house.’
She smiled back at him. ‘If they were using that well we know why they died out.’
His smile faded. ‘But there’s nothing to explain the girl’s disappearance?’
‘No.’ She started packing up the microscope. ‘Lara’s camera was found some way away. If we identify the spring it came from, we might be able to place her after she was at the bus stop. Actually, can I have a quick look at the barrows? There’s running water there too.’
‘They want to excavate the barrows properly,’ he said, looking haunted.
‘Who?’
‘I don’t know, some government department. They want to see all the finds I gave you, and look at the drawings. And now you’ve dug up the bones, too, they will want to see them.’
‘Is that OK with you?’
He shrugged. ‘It’s not just my history, it belongs to the New Forest. I thought, if you have time, you could have a look over the letter for me. I don’t want to agree to having the thing destroyed. They can’t do it without my permission, can they?’
She was touched. ‘Of course not. But they won’t destroy the barrows at all. It would be a lot less invasive than the first dig.’
‘Well, I think there’s been enough damage done. I’m donating all the finds and skeletons as well.’ He took a deep breath. ‘In fact, I’m thinking of selling up.’
Sage sat back. ‘Wow. I think that’s a great idea.’
He looked out of the window. ‘The thing is, I’d hate to leave the animals behind. No one’s going to look after them.’
‘I suppose you could sell the house with a nice bit of garden and keep the land. If you wanted to, you could even set up a nature reserve.’
He thought about it. ‘You’re right. I could. There’s thirty-five acres of woodland, and about three acres of garden. It wouldn’t cost that much to separate them and fence them off. That way I’d have a say on the barrows’ future.’ He sighed. ‘This house hasn’t been an easy place for me.’
She looked around. ‘I imagine a house this big in the New Forest would be worth a packet.’
‘I could give my mother some money.’ He looked at the floor, his voice rougher. ‘And my sister. My father didn’t leave either of them a penny. It’s made them bitter towards me.’
‘Have you had any recent contact with your mother?’
He shrugged. ‘Only when he died. Then her solicitor contacted me. But I thought they were probably after the money. That’s what he always said, she always wanted something from him.’
‘Maybe she was as much a victim as you were.’
He shrugged. ‘Maybe. But she could have taken me with her. Why did she take my sister and not me?’
Sage shook her head. She couldn’t imagine leaving Max, especially with an abusive partner. ‘How about your sister?’
‘She did ask me questions about the Lara Black thing when we met. She didn’t believe me when I told her what happened.’ He sat down at the table, opposite Sage. ‘I don’t remember much about it. There are things, but I can’t place the sequence they happened in.’
Sage tensed inside. She knew he had never talked to the police about Lara, his father’s solicitor had made certain of that. ‘What do you mean?’
‘By the time I was questioned I was too ill to remember. I’d had a bang on the head the day after she disappeared, I was in hospital for a little while. I can’t remember how long even, but I was in a rehab place afterwards for brain-injured people.’
‘How did you hit your head?’
He shook his head. ‘I really don’t know. I thought afterwards that maybe it was my father, although he’d never hurt me that badly before. But then I was told I might have had a kick from the horses. Apparently I was found outside the stable the day after Lara disappeared, unconscious.’
‘Don’t you remember Lara at all?’
‘Oh, I knew her, sort of. We used to say hello on the bus. I saw her at college occasionally; her older brother was in the year above me. He was a bully, I got teased a lot.’ He shook his head. ‘They knew I’d been expelled from my old school.’
Sage waited for him to collect his thoughts. She packed the scope into its case, her pulse starting to skip in her throat.
‘I know I got off the college bus at the roundabout and walked up the road,’ he said. ‘There’s a forest bus, but it just goes between the villages, it’s not very frequent. She was standing at the bus stop; she must have missed one and the next one was an hour later.’
‘So that’s where you saw her.’
His face was different, his expression cold. ‘She called me over.’ He frowned, staring out of the window. ‘Someone driving by saw us, but I was just talking. They said that.’ He shook his head. ‘She was flirting with me. She was pretty.’
Sage swallowed. ‘That’s natural, isn’t it, to flirt?’
‘I can tell you what I think happened.’
Sage nodded. The atmosphere had darkened as he wrestled with the difficult memory.
‘I think she asked to see the horses,’ he said. ‘Because I do remember showing them to a girl and I never talked to anyone else. I know the horses were still there then, because I told her their names. Jenny and Brutus.’ He seemed to be lost in the past. ‘Every day I would get feed, fill up the water then I’d give them a good brush and turn them back out if the weather was good. After college, I’d get them back in, dry them off and water them. I remember her talking to the horses while I went to get water.’
Sage lifted her bag onto her shoulder and waited.
He seemed to look inward, turning away from Sage, his voice small. ‘I must have been coming back with the buckets, when I heard something. A scream, a shout, but cut off. I wasn’t sure if it was her. I thought it could be a bird or an animal. I searched around but she was gone and her bag was just there, on the barrow. Her rucksack. I don’t remember a camera, but I think she had something on a strap around her neck.’
An idea started to germinate in Sage’s brain. ‘But where was the bag?’
‘On the smaller barrow, on the top. You get a good view of the church and the farm from there.’
She headed for the door. ‘I need to see the barrows.’
‘I’ll come with you.’
‘No! I mean,’ she said, with a weak smile, ‘I’m just ch
ecking something. I’m going to get a quick sample of the water dripping out of the barrow into that muddy patch. Then I’ll come straight back.’
He shrugged, hunching his shoulders up as if he was hurt. ‘My memory is all mixed up.’ He frowned, shuffled his feet. ‘Head injuries do that, they said. I do remember lying on the ground, stunned. Everything was red, I was covered in blood, the paramedic was there.’
Sage stared up at him as he took a deep breath, looking at the ground.
‘I think my father hurt me,’ he whispered. ‘Why would he do that? I did everything he said.’
‘Of course you did.’
‘I didn’t touch the girl.’ He looked straight at Sage. ‘But my father blamed me, he accused me…’ He seemed lost in some dark pain of his own.
Sage backed out onto the front doorstep. ‘Don’t worry about that now, we’ll sort it all out. You were living with a cruel bully, you were very young.’
‘I didn’t do anything to Lara. I’m telling the truth. I just moved her bag to the bus shelter so I wouldn’t get accused of stealing it.’
‘I believe you.’ She stumbled a little on the rough ground beyond the steps. ‘She might have come back for it.’
He walked towards her with an odd expression on his face. ‘But now you know about Lara. I didn’t tell anyone else. Do you think I should have told the police? They might have found her.’
‘I don’t know. You did what you could at the time – you did what you were told.’
His face was different now, focused, anger twisting his mouth. ‘I shouldn’t have told you about the horses.’ There was something familiar about his expression, she’d seen it before on Elliott’s face as he told her he was going to cut her baby out of her. She started backing away.
‘No one blames you for the horses,’ she said, and even as she heard the words she started to wonder. The animals were tortured in the forest after he was excluded from school… ‘Alistair, it was such a long time ago.’
A Shroud of Leaves Page 28